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Why I love OCaml (2023)

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Re: Why I love OCaml (2023)

#101

Post by belter »

japhib wrote: post #51

Elixir is the closest thing to OCaml that has a chance at semi-mainstream usage IMO. It has basically all of the stuff about functional programming that makes it easier to reason about your code & get work done - immutability, pattern matching, actors, etc. But without monads or a complicated type system that would give it a higher barrier to entry. And of course it's built on top of the Erlang BEAM runtime, which ha…

BEAM performance model trades throughput for isolation, which hurts CPU-bound tasks, and ironically, whenever you need speed, you end up using NIFs that break BEAM safety guarantees, and reintroduce the exact fragility Elixir was supposed to avoid.

In 2025, Elixir is a beautiful system for a niche that infrastructure has already abstracted away.

Re: Why I love OCaml (2023)

#102

Post by jimbokun »

retrac wrote: post #19
assbuttbuttass wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love standard ml (I'm currently writing a compiler for it), but it's far from perfect. There are weird special cases in the language definition like the ad-hoc overloading between int and real, or the annoying value restriction. Records also feel half-baked, with no support for updating fields or for partially-specified records where the full set of fields is not known

> with no support for updating fields While it's not yet standard nearly all Standard ML implementations support what has become known as "Successor ML" [0]. A large subset of Successor ML is common to SML/NJ, MLton, Poly/ML, MLKit and other implementations. That includes record update syntax, binary literals, and more expressive patterns among other deficiencies in Standard ML. For me the two big remaining issues ar…

As I was saying, Successor ML is like OCaml, but perfect!

Re: Why I love OCaml (2023)

#103

Post by agentultra »

Why isn't it more popular?

I think Richard Feldman [0] proposed some of the most reasonable theories as to why functional programming isn't the norm. Your language needs to be the platform-exclusive language for a widely used platform, have a killer application for a highly desired application domain, or be backed by a monster war-chest of marketing money to sway opinions.

Since Feldman's talk, Python has grown much faster in popularity in the sense of wide use in the market place... but mostly because it's the scripting language of choice for PyTorch and AI-adjacent libraries/tooling/frameworks which is... a killer application.

I like OCaml. I started evaluating functional programming in it by taking the INRIA course online. I spent the last four and half years working in Haskell. I've built some side projects in Zig. I was a CL stan for many years. I asked this question a lot. We often say, "use the best tool for the job." Often that means, "use the tool that's available."

I think languages like OCaml, Rust, Haskell etc can be "popular," but in the sense that people like to talk about them and want to learn them and be able to use them (at least, as trends come and go). It's different from "popular" as in, "widely adopted."

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyJZzq0v7Z4

Re: Why I love OCaml (2023)

#104

Post by jimbokun »

belter wrote: post #101
japhib wrote: post #51

Elixir is the closest thing to OCaml that has a chance at semi-mainstream usage IMO. It has basically all of the stuff about functional programming that makes it easier to reason about your code & get work done - immutability, pattern matching, actors, etc. But without monads or a complicated type system that would give it a higher barrier to entry. And of course it's built on top of the Erlang BEAM runtime, which ha…

BEAM performance model trades throughput for isolation, which hurts CPU-bound tasks, and ironically, whenever you need speed, you end up using NIFs that break BEAM safety guarantees, and reintroduce the exact fragility Elixir was supposed to avoid. In 2025, Elixir is a beautiful system for a niche that infrastructure has already abstracted away.

> In 2025, Elixir is a beautiful system for a niche that infrastructure has already abstracted away.

Do you mean Kubernetes?

My mental model of Erlang and Elixir is programming languages where the qualities of k8s are pushed into the language itself. On the one hand this restricts you to those two languages (or other ports to BEAM), on the other hand it allows you to get the kinds of fall over, scaling, and robustness of k8s at a much more responsive and granular level.

Re: Why I love OCaml (2023)

#105

Post by 7thaccount »

procaryote wrote: post #49
jddj wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost there, but in the meantime supporting a casual squillion dollars of trades at JS

Yeah, but when these things happen I ask myself, is Jane Street successful because of ocaml, or did they just happen to pick ocaml and then make it work? There might be some power in attracting all the people who happen to love ocaml, if there are enough of competent people to staff your company, but that's more a case of cornering a small niche than picking on technical merits

They've spoken about this before and might not have picked OCaml if they had to make the decision again today. I think at the time it made the most sense.They can also make it work in any language as they claim to only recruit the best and brightest in the world (this may be the truth). My opinion is they could have chosen many languages and had similar results while balancing different trade-offs.

Regarding attracting talent, they've said they don't care about existing knowledge of OCaml as the language part is something they train staff on anyway. Their interviews are brutal from what I recall. I could be an OCaml expert and have no chance of making it through an interview without equal talent in high performance fintech and relevant mathematics.

Re: Why I love OCaml (2023)

#106

Post by schonfinkel »

BenGosub wrote: post #80
japhib wrote: post #51

Elixir is the closest thing to OCaml that has a chance at semi-mainstream usage IMO. It has basically all of the stuff about functional programming that makes it easier to reason about your code & get work done - immutability, pattern matching, actors, etc. But without monads or a complicated type system that would give it a higher barrier to entry. And of course it's built on top of the Erlang BEAM runtime, which ha…

I think that a better question is why F# isn't a more popular language, since it's much closer to OCaml, than Elixir and you can use the whole Dotnet ecosystem in F#, which is one of the weakest points of OCaml (no libraries).

The answer is (most likely) Microsoft, I kid you not. I've worked with F# professionally for many years is its incredible how they are literally sitting atop a gold mine that is the output of Microsoft research and do basically nothing with it. Even though it's sold as an ecosystem, .NET revolves around C# and its related tooling.

"Type Providers" are an example of such negligence btw, it's something from the early 2010's that never got popular even though some of its ideas (Typed SQL that can generate compile-time errors) are getting traction now in other ecosystems (like Rust's SQLx).

My team used SQL Providers in a actual production system, combined with Fable (to leverage F# on the front end) and people always commented how our demos had literally 0 bugs, maybe it was too productive for our own good.

Re: Why I love OCaml (2023)

#107

Post by MeetingsBrowser »

ilaksh wrote: post #91

Why isn't it more popular if it's so good? Because popularity and merit are not the same thing. People confuse them all the time though. Check out the most popular music today. Like the top ten songs currently. Do you think those are really the best songs out there? Popularity is mostly driven by either trends or momentum.

I think popularity and regarded favorably are probably inversely correlated.

Many of the most popular languages are also the most hated. Many of the more niche languages are viewed the most favorably.

It is easy to dislike something yo are familiar with, and easy to be overoptimistic about something you don't know as well.

"the grass is always greener ... "

Re: Why I love OCaml (2023)

#108

Post by systems »

timhh wrote: post #96

> why isn’t OCaml more popular I've used OCaml a bit and found various issues with it: * Terrible Windows support. With OCaml 5 it's upgraded to "pretty bad". * The syntax is hard to parse for humans. Often it turns into a word soup, without any helpful punctuation to tell you what things are. It's like reading a book with no paragraphs, capitalisation or punctuation. * The syntax isn't recoverable. Sometimes you can…

+10 for bad windows support, i think this is a key and weirdly underestimated reason

just to give an idea how bad, until recently, you could not just go to ocaml.org and download ocaml for windows, you had to either download one for mingw or wsl

so for many it was just not installable, i.e. for many we didnt have ocaml for windows, until very very recently

Re: Why I love OCaml (2023)

#109

Post by timeon »

seanw444 wrote: post #35
pohl wrote: post #7

To this day, whenever I see Machine Learning abbreviated, my heart skips a beat, then I become crestfallen as I realize I'm not about to read something about Meta Language.

I'd rather have that issue than seeing "AI" plastered all over the place. I'm of the opinion AI should be reserved for artificial general intelligence. These things aren't intelligent yet. They're just em-bloat-ified traditional machine learning techniques. Not that they're useless. I just hate the terminology. If people start using the term AI, we better be living in I, Robot. Not whatever the hell this is. Tangenti…

I also think AK would fit better.

Re: Why I love OCaml (2023)

#110

Post by debugnik »

karmakaze wrote: post #24

I've dabbled in F# (and aside from the rough setup with little coherent information at the time) had a pretty good time. Actor-based concurrency was easy to grok. The one gotcha was whenever those mutable Arrays entered the picture. I'd like to hear some practical reasons for preferring OCaml over F#. [Hoping I don't get a lot about MS & .NET which are valid concerns but not what I'm curious about.] I want to know mo…

It's a matter of trends: F# is losing compatibility with the overall CLR ecosystem due to the churn in C# features with poor F# interop, but F# has already mingled its design with the CLR's, too much to live on its own as a native language. Plus its compiler is slow and the tooling is getting increasingly unstable.

Meanwhile, OCaml got rid of its global lock, got a really fast-compiling native toolchain with stable and improving editor tooling, and has a cleaner language design with some really powerful features unavailable to F#, like modules/functors, GADTs, effects or preprocessors. It somehow got immutable arrays before F#!

F# still has an edge on some domains due to having unboxed types, SIMD, better Windows support and the CLR's overall performance. But the first two are already in the OxCaml fork and will hopefully get upstreamed in the following years, and the third is improving already, now that the opam package manager supports Windows.

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